June 20, 2011

Not sure if anyone reads this blog anymore but, if you do, we'd like to kindly redirect you over to the Hobart blog 2.0. We're hoping that the encouraged brevity of tumblr will create in us a similarly ecouraged (and nfewfound) frequence/regularity/consistenct/etc. of updating. Come on over there, follow us, rss us, whatevs.

April 27, 2011

First up, I feel almost required to start with: why baseball? Did you grow up playing the sport? Who’s your team?

Baseball has always been the most fantastical of sports for me--although it’s comparably slow-moving (at least in relation to basketball and football), it feels like there are so many individual and group possibilities within a single game. I grew up watching Home Run Derby reruns, and have always viewed the game within similar iconic contexts.

I did play through high school, first as a starter, then a relief pitcher. I had a nagging shoulder problem, and left baseball to run track, but definitely missed the sport, especially the control and dynamic of being up there on the mound, the chance to win the game or let it go to shit.

I have to say the Yankees--I know it’s a common choice, but my family’s from the Bronx, and I was a sucker for the Gehrig/Ruth mystique. I still go to games when I can.

Second, and this will probably be either a seemingly-obvious-to-ask question, or a dumb one, but I feel I have to ask: were these guys (Barrett Stickle, King Dolan, etc.) real people? If so, how and where did you find them; and, if not, were there inspirations or research?

The players depicted in the book are not directly real, but they are certainly amalgamations of real players, teams, situations, etc. And I do mention some actual players, like Addie Joss. The sum collective is the archetypal dead-ball era player: scrappy, fresh, sometimes prone to off-the-field trouble. I’ve always been fascinated by Ty Cobb (even his name sounds larger-than-life), as well as players like Sam Crawford, who is legendary for hitting triples.

Now that I really think about it, that’s the defining thing for me about the era--a triple is a hustle-hit: a down in the dirt, win or lose it all kind of risk that we don’t see as often anymore in the contemporary game. It’s certainly still a crowd favorite--in some ways, I think of it as the player over-extending himself. The guys of that area were absolutely athletic, of course, but I also get the sense that they learned the tricks of the game, and were willing to exploit them whenever possible.

I pored over baseball stats as a kid, even made my own extensive record books and gave them to my family at Christmas (they humored me). I went back to some of those old books for the occasional idea, but then took the fictional results wherever felt authentic as narratives.

Continuing that... were there any of these players (of your own creation, from the book) that you fell especially in love with during the writing (or even later? during the editing or collecting for the book?)? Any that you kind of wanted to keep going with, give more than the space of only a page? Any that you kind of wish had really existed?

Tris Hooper, the last in the final version of the book, was actually the first profile I wrote, and the character I feel is most deserving of a full story (or something longer). His fate at the end feels a bit unfair, but I think the trajectory of his narrative and life is really representative of the dead-ball aesthetic. And Noone Pender is a bit of a pathetic soul, and yet someone who intersected with greatness.

I wish Box Joseph was a real person--I’m sure he’s an archetype of sorts, particularly the passing of the game from father to son. Although my father was a football player, we did play baseball together--and I spent so much time playing with my older brothers, who really broke down the game for me, represented it as an art form. One of my brothers chose football over baseball at the University of Delaware, and it sometimes sounds like a lament from him--another missed opportunity of sorts that adds to the legend of the game.

Part of what I love about baseball, I think, (and you mention this above) is its tendency toward narrative -- something about its slow pace, and also the way it feels so segmented. Games, down to innings, down to at bats. I’m probably overreaching for metaphor here, but that segmentation seems to really lend itself to the writing in this particular book. And, along those lines, is the language itself -- both precise in the way the best short-shorts are, and the, for lack of better term, “baseball-ness” of it. “long arms, stood far from the plate.” “At the chest, at the heart, where a throw belongs.” This is not really a question and, admittedly, more an excuse to highlight the baseball phrasings that I love and that you used so effectively, but could you talk at all abut the form and language of these pieces?

Thanks for the compliment--I’m a huge fan of Don DeLillo’s End Zone: a book about football, not baseball, but certainly a book about identifiable moments of athletic action (as you say, “segments” of a larger whole). DeLillo captured the cadence of football, and I’ve absolutely wondered if an equivalent existed for baseball, a game that, despite its boundaries of inning and such, could theoretically go on forever. Baseball happens in bursts: crack of the bat, sliding into a base, the hold-your-breath moment of a fly ball lost in heavy sun. Since I knew I wanted to work within a truncated form, I really thought the sentences in the book should occur as bunts: sometimes quite short, others dribbling along.

In terms of form, baseball is a conundrum: 9 innings, 3 outs per inning, so we know the frame of nearly every game (ones that are not canceled because of weather, or the home team up in the bottom of the final inning). That said, I always enter a game with a strong optimism that it is bottom-heavy: there’s nothing worse than a strong first 3 innings and a boring final 6. I tried to make the profiles lead somewhere, at least emotionally, even if baseball games so often end with an anticlimactic whisper. Last summer I went to a Yankees game like that--rally in the 9th, bases loaded, ended on a strikeout. I think nearly everybody in the stadium remained in their seats a bit longer than necessary, hoping the game would go on.

April 14, 2011

Lots of exciting news to report from the lands of books and Hobart lately. Here's a round-up:

-Hobart contributor (issue 11) Steve Himmer's novel The Bee-Loud Glade is out now from Atticus Books and it is an amazing, wild ride of a book about a guy named Finch, a decorative hermit. Yes, really. Here's an excerpt, published first at PANK in a story called, "Be Your Own Boss:"

-Hobart contributor ("Not Hearing the Jingle") Brian Allen Carr's story collection Short Bus is out now from Texas Review Press. I got the book in the mail yesterday and have been reading it in little bursts. The stories are at turns grotesque, disturbing, hilarious and heartbreaking. Here's an excerpt from the first story, the terrific "Running the Drain" which first appeared in NOÖ Journal:

I like what Matt has to say here about a project coming together organically, in such a way that structure of the larger whole emerges from the dramatic potential of the language or the implication of idea, stacked, waiting to be realized. This book seems really exciting.

-I'll be at the Juniper Literary Festival at UMass Amherst starting tomorrow with Hobart books and journals (and a couple flasks for new subscribers!). Stop by the table if you're in Western Mass. Bonus, for doing so: Hobart friend (and contributor) Roy Kesey is reading tomorrow night at 7:30! And, I'll be moderating a panel on first books and the publishing process, featuring Cynthia Arrieu-King, Margaret Luongo, Kiki Petrosino, Mira Bartok and Pam Thompson on Saturday at 2:45. Come see me be really nervous and ask some really talented writers and poets some questions about book publishing. I'd like to imagine you all in your underwear.

December 09, 2010

It's that time of year again, when everyone discounts and special offers run aplenty -- every time we turn on the computer, it seems we are finding another new and awesome deal from a small press we love, to the point where it seems we may have already bought more new books than we can read in the rest of our lives. So... why not use this opportunity to add another atop the pile, right?

Every year, we like to send a special hokiday gift as a kind of thank you for all of our subscribers. In years past these have included an author calendar and gift packs of Big World coasters and teaser chapbooks. This year, we have possibly our best gift yet, a chapbook of holiday stories by Short Flight / Long Drive authors Michelle Orange and Mary Miller, as well as the above-pictured, limited-to-subscribers-only-and-then-these-will-be-gone Hobart flasks.

If you're already a subscriber, you should be receiving these in the next week or two. If not, subscriber before December 15th!

3) We could use another reader or 4 -- if you are interested in helping out and reading some submissions for Hobart, shoot me an email (aaron (at) hobartpulp.com).

3a) Speaking of help, any web design wizards love Hobart and want to help with some redesigning/restructuring/etc.? We could maybe even pay you, though not a lot. But... something!

4) Minibook news: a second printing of Mary Miller's Big World (with a new, bonus story and an introduction by Chris Offutt) and Book 2 of Adam Novy's The Avian Gospels have been released this week and are currently in the mail!

November 12, 2010

This is what I’d expect people who study fiction in college to read. These are the kind of stories that have a different meaning for everyone who reads them and reading them makes you feel like you know exactly what they mean, but at the same time they are talking about something way over your head.

I acquired this book when my brother, who’s at college, accidentally left it on the bottom shelf of a bookcase in the living room behind a computer monitor. I picked it up and decided to read it because I knew it would impress my brother. The first story explained to me the origin of the word buffalo and finally settled the “bison or buffalo?” debate for me. It’s something I’ve wondered about for a while and I can’t wait to tell my friends the real difference. I kept reading.

I don’t generally read much, but each one of these 10 page stories is like a fiction book and a poem had a baby. The result is something I can finish in one day and it makes me feel like I’m reading one of the ancient philosophers but they’re not talking about the meaning of life. In short, if you read this book you’ll feel like a writer, and if you already are a writer, you’ll probably like this book.

September 27, 2010

A Santo in the Image of Cristóbal García Fiction by Rick Collignon Unbridled Books, June 2010 Paperback: 288pp

Originally published in 2002, the 2010 paperback edition of Rick Collignon’s third novel in his Guadalupe series, A Santo in the Image of Cristóbal García, still manages to captivate with its unique blend of mystery and magical realism. From its initial pages, readers are transported to the imaginary, Macondo-like town of Guadalupe in New Mexico, where junipers, tortillas, vigas, ghosts and saints, bleeding trees, and memories—all of these come to life and haunt reality, especially for Flavio Montóya, who looks up from his sister’s fields at the start of the novel only to find the mountains burning. But who set the hills aflame? Was it Flavio? Was it his friend, Felix García, the eighty-year old mute, who walks out of the flames and speaks after an eight-year, stroke-induced silence? Or was it the shrouded black figure that has haunted the town since Cristóbal García carved her in despair?

The genius of Collignon’s novel lies in its structure. Cristóbal García is set up as a dream sequence, weaving back and forth via flashback and foreshadow, introducing characters and their plights long before each is fully explained. This nonlinear pace can get tiresome and redundant, of course; but Collignon’s dreamy prose is top-notch, unrelenting, so that his words come across in true folklore fashion, and as an extension of his self-proclaimed love for the oral tradition of the New Mexico region:

When the two men walked into Las Sombras, not only did they find everyone who had lived there gone, but the entire village had been burned. Each house was no more than charred adobe, the walls lying in heaps or at best half standing. Ceilings had collapsed and the latillas and vigas were only black ashes. The sole structure unharmed was the church. It stood in the middle of all the debris as if it had left the village when the fires had begun and not returned until it was safe.

In Cristóbal García, Collignon’s take on history is that it may be cyclical, but ultimately personal. Past deeds (good or evil) are never forgotten in the Guadalupe universe, but meant to endure and affect the present. It is a town where “the walls are made of bones” and “no one forgets…even if they don’t remember;” where the sins of previous generations are owed. Enigmas abound in the novel, saturating its pages in the surreal, so that character actions come across as dichotomies more often than not, even in the face of true danger:

Vehicles were parked half on the pavement and half on the shoulder all the way to where the road climbed out of the valley to Las Sombras. People were walking about, visiting or standing in groups. Whole families were sitting in the beds of their pickups, the butt end of the trucks parked so that they faced the fire. The village squad car and a number of state police cars were in the midst of everyone, their lights flashing, their sirens off. It looked like the entire country had come to Guadalupe for a party. Kids were running up and down the highway. Six-packs of beer and soda pop were being passed around. Flavio knew most of the people, but there were others, standing off by themselves, whom he had never seen before. The only traffic moving was in one lane in the center of the road, and even that was almost at a standstill.

Everyone and everything is interconnected in Cristóbal García, and an uneasiness haunts each character in the form of their memories. Along with Flavio and Felix mentioned earlier, readers are treated to other quirky characters; and it’s through Collignon’s strong characterization that the novel’s primary themes of home, displacement, and death are strengthened. We listen to Guadalupe García, for instance, the town crazy woman, foreshadowing the town’s demise with her visions as a child—visions that ultimately ostracize her and her family from the rest of the populace. There’s Guadalupe’s ancestor, Emilio García, the bandit of Guadalupe legend, who is hung from the cottonwood tree outside the town church under mysterious circumstances; as well as Ramona, Flavio’s sister, the painter of burning fields and cemeteries. Finally, readers are introduced to Cristóbal García himself, the patriarch and founder of the town of Guadalupe, who goes mad in the wilderness after carving his saint, only to have her return time and again throughout his life (as well as that of his descendants) to haunt the town in the guise of a woman in black.

Originally described by Publisher’s Weekly in 2002 as a work of fiction situated “squarely in a tired genre,” this paperback edition of Cristóbal García is proof of the permanence and continued popularity of Collignon’s prose. Though not as monumental as Márquez’s One Hundred Years of Solitude in terms of depth and scope, A Santo in the Image of Cristóbal García deserves all its accolades which, in this reader’s estimation, are well earned.

July 27, 2010

(Note: you don't even know how excited I was, upon Google image searching "go west, young man" to not only discover that it was the title of a Michael W. Smith album, but it was image number 1 on the page.)

As you may already know, Amelia Gray, Lindsay Hunter, and I are heading west for our High Emission Book Tour. We plan on wasting as much gas as possible, and electricity, and generally doing our part to counteract every thing James Kaelan is doing to not leave a a carbon footprint on his Zero Emission Book Tour. We're going to leave like eleventeenhundred footprints! OK, not really, but the idea of our tour name made us laugh, and that's about all that goes into naming a tour.

Our first stops will be back-to-back Vermin on the Mount readings in San Diego then Los Angeles. Have you ever been to a Vermin reading? Oh, man. They're the best. We're excited!

From there, we're headed up to San Francisco, for two readings. Between the two, we're going to be reading with Reynard Seifert, Lauren Becker, Andrea Kneeland, and Greg Gerke. I know, right?

Also, for three of these first four readings, we're going to have Avian Gospels author, Adam Novy, with us. Novy's book will be out in another month or so, but we're going to have some special preview copies on tour with us. They're beautiful, and the words inside will kick your ass. Seriously. Laird Hunt said it is “is one of the most original novels I’ve read in months, maybe years.”

and Sal Plascencia said I have seen the horrors of broken fidelities to kin and creed, brutal sights of carnage and betrayal. “But I have also seen soaring, beautiful, sculptures—sights never before imagined or dreamt. I blame Adam Novy for all of this.”

From the Bay, we're rocking it to Sacramento to hang with the flatmancrooked crew and where we will probably have to duke it out emission-style.

I made a short promo-type video for the tour and, whether or not you want to donate money for the cause, the Kickstarter page is a good collection of all the tour dates, places, times, readers, and all that. I don't think I can express how excited we are to have already raised so much money Of course, if you want to donate a couple dollars, either because you are so in love with us and the cause, or just because you want some of those rad rewards, awesome! All funds will be used solely for tour expenses and, if we happen to have anything extra, it'll be used for gas money next month when we do a short midwest dollar store reunion tour (wait for it... first sneak peak at dates for those coming.... NOW!):